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Mel Lastman’s arts palace seeks to reinvent itself: Knelman

Toronto Centre for the Arts' mostly dark main stage theatre to be divided into two to meet demand in city hungry for small venues.

The Toronto Centre for the Arts currently has three performances spaces including a popular 200-seat venue in big demand and a main stage theatre that sits empty most nights. A new plan would see the 1800-seat big theatre turned into two smaller, less expensive spaces.
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The Toronto Centre for the Arts is seeking a new lease on life via a $4-millon makeover — with help from Toronto City Hall.

Pim Schotanus, general manager of the city-owned and -subsidized arts centre at Yonge St. and Sheppard Ave., is quarterbacking a startling plan to divide the 1,800-seat main space into two smaller performance venues.

What is currently the stage of the main theatre would be turned into a new venue — a 350-seat black box called the Stage Tower Theatre — to be ready by the spring of 2014.

An acoustical wall would be built to separate the old stage area from the rest of the main space. In the proposed second phase of the project, a 600-seat venue called the Lyric Theatre would be completed by September 2015.

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“After 20 years the time has come to make a change,” Schotanus explained in an interview. Enough time has gone by for me to stand up and say ‘Enough’s enough.’ We need to move forward.”

Radical as this change may seem, it comes with its own insurance plan. No part of the old main space would be destroyed, and the reconfiguration could be reversed after five or 10 years if prospects for Broadway-style shows in the north part of the GTA show a marked improvement.

Currently the centre receives about $1.7 million from the city to subsidize its annual operations, and, like Toronto’s other two civic-owned theatres, TCA has been asked by the city to look for ways to improve its track record.

City council’s task force on the operations of these theatres found in 2012 that TCA is a valuable community asset because of the popularity of its two smaller spaces, the 1000-seat George Weston concert hall and the 200-seat Studio Theatre. Indeed, the Studio Theatre, home to small companies such as the Harold Green Jewish Theatre, is in constant demand and is used 280 days of the year.

The problem is that the much larger main stage has been dark most of the time since Aubrey Dan stopped presenting Broadway-style musicals in an attempt to compete with the dominant Mirvish empire.

And the way Schotanus and his team see the future, it makes no sense to hang onto a huge Broadway-style house and keep it dark while at the same time having to turn away clients who would like to have a place to do smaller, less expensive shows.

That’s why it makes sense to replace a sleeping giant with two more intimate theatres. There’s good reason to believe the results of such a transformation will include increasing the number annual visitors to TCA and providing more opportunities for many groups in Toronto’s not-for-profit arts community.

The city would pay half the $4-million cost, in addition to its annual operating subsidy. Existing union contracts would be renegotiated so that the cost of presenting shows in the two new theatres would be much lower than at the existing main space.

In fact, the idea of reconfiguring the space goes back a decade. Built in 1993, thanks to Mel Lastman, when he was mayor of what was then North York, the facility was operated by Garth Drabinsky’s Livent and known as the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts. After the implosion of Livent in 1998, the main space was mostly dark for years, and that’s when management started creating a Plan B.

But then Broadway shows came back, at least sporadically, with the launch of Dancap Productions in 2007. There was even a two-year run of
Jersey Boys
.

Might there be any way of finding some magician who could book the right kind of fare to keep an 1,800-seat theatre at Sheppard and Yonge operating successfully for years to come? At the moment, prospects of that seem dim.

That’s why the reconfiguration plan has already been recommended by staff at city hall. I feel safe in predicting that in February, Toronto City Council will vote to go forward with the reconfiguration plan.

A 51-page call for proposals has gone out to prospective architects. Much of the planning so far was done by George Freedman Architects. The deadline for proposals is mid-February.

Correction – December 11, 2013:
This article was edited from a previous version that said the Weston Hall will be divided into two. As well the article said the Toronto Centre for the Arts has two performance spaces.

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